Enigma

and white tiles towards Romilly's feet. 'I'm going to have to stay here, sir, I'm afraid, for as long as it takes.'
    He let the flap snap shut. Weary with self-disgust, he turned away and leaned his good shoulder against one of the pillars. He looked across the street to the little communal gardens. From beyond the houses opposite came the pleasant hum of the early-evening traffic on Cromwell Road. He grimaced. The pain had begun to move out from his back now, establishing lines of communication into his legs, his arms, his neck; everywhere,
    He wasn't sure how long he knelt there, looking at the budding trees, listening to the cars, until at last behind him Romilly unlocked the door.
    He was fifty or thereabouts, with an ascetic, almost monkish face, and as Jericho followed him up the wide staircase, he found himself thinking, as he often did on? meeting men of that generation, that this would be roughly the age of his father now, if he had lived. Romilly led Jericho through a doorway into darkness and tugged open a pair of heavy curtains. Light spilled into a drawing room full of furniture draped in white sheets. Only a sofa was uncovered, and a table, pushed up close to a marble fireplace. On the table was some dirty crockery; on the mantelpiece, a large pair of matching silver photograph frames.
    'One lives alone,' said Romilly apologetically fanning away the dust. 'One never entertains.' He hesitated, then walked over to the fireplace and picked up one of the photographs. This is Claire,' he said, quietly. 'Taken a week before she died.'
    A tall, thin girl with dark ringlets smiled up a" Jericho.
    'And this is my wife. She died two months after Claire.'
    The mother had the same colouring and bone-structure as the daughter. Neither looked remotely like the woman Jericho knew as Claire.
    'She was driving alone in a motorcar,' went on Romilly, 'when it ran off an empty road and struck a tree. The coroner was kind enough to record it as an accident.' His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. 'Does anyone know you're here?'
    'No, sir.'
    'Wigram?'
    'No.'
    'I see.' Romilly took the pictures from him and replaced them on the mantelpiece, realigning them precisely as they had been. He stared from mother to daughter and back again.
    'This will sound absurd to you,' he said eventually, without looking at Jericho, 'it sounds absurd to me, now—but it seemed to be a way of bringing her back. Can you understand that? I mean, the idea that another girl of exactly her age would be going around, using her name, doing what she might have done . . . Living her life ... I thought it might make sense of what had happened, d'you see? Give her death a purpose, after all these years. Foolish, but . . .' He raised a hand to his eyes. It was a minute before he could speak. 'What exactly do you want from me, Mr Jericho?'
    Romilly lifted a dustsheet and found a bottle of whisky and a pair of tumblers. They sat on the sofa together staring at the empty fire.
    'What exactly do you want from me?'
    The truth, at last, perhaps? Confirmation? Peace of mind? An ending...
    And Romilly seemed to want to give it, as if he recognised in Jericho a fellow sufferer.
    It had been Wigram's bright idea, he said, to put an agent into Bletchley Park. A woman. Someone who could keep an eye on this peculiar collection of characters, so essential to the defeat of Germany, yet so alien to the tradition of intelligence; who had, indeed, destroyed that tradition, turning what had been an art—a game, if you like, for gentlemen—into a science of mass production.
    'Who were you all? What were you? Could all of you be trusted?'
    No one at Bletchley was to know she was an agent, that was important, not even the commander. And she had to come from the right kind of background, that was absolutely vital, otherwise she might have been dumped at some wretched out-station somewhere, and Wigram needed her there, at the heart of the place.
    Romilly poured himself another drink and offered to top up Jericho's, but Jericho covered his glass.
    Well, he said, sighing, putting the bottle at his feet, it was harder than one might think to manufacture such a person: to conjure her into life complete with identity card and ration books and all the other paraphernalia of wartime life, to give her the right background ('the right legend,' as Wigram had termed it), without at the very least dragging in the Home Office and half a dozen government agencies who knew nothing of the